Whether the public are “low-grade people” or something else will doubtless be one for the HOT TOPIC DEBATE section of the nightly running order on Nigel’s new show. As someone who once saw him blow out a pub full of his own crestfallen supporters to go and have fish and chips with reality TV dimbulb Joey Essex – and lack even the courtesy to tell them – I have my suspicions that Nigel doesn’t say what he really thinks quite as much as he says he does.

Nigel finds it hard to hand over, so consider the possibility that he will broadcast continuously until he gets an American job offer

Certainly, his stand-in stints on LBC hitherto have hinted at a frustration with the calling public. During one, at the end of November, a listener’s insistence on contradicting Farage with his own previous statements caused him to ask: “Can more people ring in to say how much they dislike Tony Blair, John Major and Tim Farron?” A politician whose chief refrain is that politicians have stopped listening to ordinary people, Nigel may like to remind ordinary people that their call is important to him, as long as they agree with him.

As for the bizarre suggestion that this new gig will interfere with Nigel’s work as a serving MEP, how could it possibly? It is widely assumed he turns up to Strasbourg only to do his expenses and make a biannual speech in the chamber in which he accuses his MEP colleagues of never having done a day’s work in their lives. You may remember the classic reaction shot to one of these, where the EU official with his face in his hand just behind Nigel turned out to be a cardiac surgeon born in the Siberian gulag to which Stalin deported his parents, who began his political career in the underground anti-Soviet social democrat movement. Shoulda been a very average metals trader, mate.

Other details about Nigel’s radio show? LBC says it’ll end with Farage’s Final Thought, and will last an hour. But we know that Nigel finds it hard to hand over to people, so do consider the possibility that he will unresign the microphone and simply broadcast continuously until he gets an American job offer, at which point he’ll promptly do one across the Atlantic and tell everyone what a relief it was to escape this septic isle and its low-grade people.

Until then, he joins the growing ranks of figures literally using staff jobs in the mainstream media to claim they are bypassing the mainstream media. Just as his LBC stablemate Katie Hopkins ridicules the commentariat from a column in the world’s best-read online English language newspaper, Mail Online, so Nigel will suggest he’s somehow detached from the mainframe and broadcasting outside the matrix, despite toddling in daily to LBC’s fully staffed studios in central London, except when he’s on the road in Europe or the US. Try to think of him as Morpheus, only wearing his trusty covert coat instead of a leather trench.

Which brings us to the shifting concept of prestige. There is a suggestion in some quarters that Nigel might be settling for second best by taking the 7pm slot on a talk radio station – or even 17th or 18th best. After all, it was only a few weeks ago that he was enthusiastically thrusting himself forward for a major role in international diplomacy. When Donald Trump was elected, Nigel’s initial thought was: “I would quite like to be his ambassador to the European Union.” Instead of taking him up on this offer, Trump manfully hit the ball into Theresa May’s court, declaring: “Many people would love to see Nigel Farage represent Great Britain as their ambassador to the US. He would do a great job!” It was left to Downing Street to sniff that “there is no vacancy”.

Farage’s next tack was to cast himself as someone whose skillset was tailor-made for fixing the world’s most intractable problems. The Middle East was earmarked as an area of interest, with Nigel reasoning “I’m quite good at bringing people together”. You may laugh. But let’s face it: for all its comic grotesquery, making Farage a Middle East peace envoy wouldn’t have been a tenth as auto-satirical an appointment as making Tony Blair one. And that actually happened.

These days, though, the mistake is to imagine that a talk radio gig is a massive climbdown from an ambassadorial one. In the version of the free world Trump is effectively redesigning from the top down, the two positions increasingly have a malarial kind of parity. I mean, you might be a crusty civil servant nobody cares less about – or you might host a radio show where you grow and incite your audience by floating all kinds of fringe conspiracies. In a sense, the latter is a better bet for advancement – it goes without saying that Trump places far higher value on the Infowars community, say, than he does on the CIA’s intelligence-gathering community.

Nigel Farage to host LBC radio talkshow

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So determined is the mood of so-called anti-elitism or anti-expertise that even the elites must play the game. The former cabinet minister Theresa Villiers was at it this very week, describing Britain’s resigning EU ambassador, Sir Ivan Rogers, as “emotionally needy”, which made her sound like a pundit offering a verdict on Calum Best’s behaviour in the Big Brother house.

Who would want to be a diplomat now? Civil servants are judged as though they are reality TV contestants, while reality TV stars have inherited the Earth. There are no mountains left to climb for the genre now that the Apprentice host will become president of the United States. Small wonder that Farage should be far more interested in a media career, and one on the same roster as our own highest-profile Apprentice graduate, Hopkins.

For all his faults, Farage has always been a quick study. He has learned the short-term lesson of an age hopelessly hooked on the short term: those who want to get on in Trump’s world should aspire to jobs that run on the same fuel the president-elect does – conflict and the emotional incontinence that is the best route to repeatedly sparking it. Consequently, Nigel Farage will be taking your calls.